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Daniel Kahneman has died
131–140 of 324 posts
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#132Although many of the results in Fast and Slow didn't hold up, Kahneman was always refreshingly open and honest about that, and keen to identify the limits of knowledge. Which surely is one of the best things you can say about a scientist.
I was fortunate enough to take a cognitive psych grad seminar from him in the 90s, co-taught by his wife, Anne Treisman. He always seemed given to thinking a little more deeply in the moment than most people do.
One half-joking comment he made about science in the real world vs some idealized notion of it has always stuck with me. In a discussion about whether the results of some paper conflicted with some model or theory of cognition, he mused that scientific progress in psychology (and other non-hard sciences) was really about embarrassing rivals with competing models. No high-level model was ever stated precisely enough to rule out some particular finding; you could always tweak your theory a little to accommodate it. It's just that at some point, you might be too embarrassed to do so.
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#133For me the best part about reading Thinking: Fast and Slow is that I'm more distrustful of my own thought processes. That little bit of questioning of my own conclusions has helped me see gaps in my reasoning.
My dream is to one day have the caliber of insights this man had, along with his ability to express them so clearly and persuasively.
dang, does this deserve a black bar?
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
The density of non-replicable results varies by chapter. You can ignore anything said in chapter 4 about priming for example. See https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-pe... for more.
A fun question especially considering the topic of the thread : are propositions that lack proof necessarily false?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Or, in less dramatic terms, if you cannot reject the null, you should operate on the assumption that the null holds.
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#135I'm not an economist nor that interested in them, but I did read Nassim Taleb's books* and Kahneman stuck out as one of very few economists Taleb doesn't totally trash. * I had read Eugene Koonin's "The Logic of Chance" and was then recommended Taleb's books for a more thorough perspective on probability, to apply to Koonin's work.
Nassim Taleb's opinion of others shouldn't hold much sway - the man is a prick.
He has an incredible ego, but also seems very self aware.
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#136I'm not an economist nor that interested in them, but I did read Nassim Taleb's books* and Kahneman stuck out as one of very few economists Taleb doesn't totally trash. * I had read Eugene Koonin's "The Logic of Chance" and was then recommended Taleb's books for a more thorough perspective on probability, to apply to Koonin's work.
Nassim Taleb's opinion of others shouldn't hold much sway - the man is a prick.
Taleb really has a high opinion only of himself. A very smart man, but also very self-absorbed.
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly the kind of task that I want to deploy a long context window model on: "rewrite Thinking Fast and Slow taking into account the current state of research. Oh, and do it in the voice, style and structure of Tim Urban complete with crappy stick figure drawings."
Same! Just earlier today I was wanting to do this with "The Moral Animal" and "Guns, Germs, and Steel." It's probably the AI thing I'm most excited about, and I suspect we're not far from that, although I'm betting the copyright battles are the primary obstacle to such a future at this point.
The thing with Guns, Germs, and Steel is that it make it essentially all about geographic determinism. There's another book (Why the West Rules--For Now written before China had really fully emerged on the stage) which argues that, yes, geography played an important role in which cores emerged earliest. BUT if you look at the sweep of history, the eastern core was arguably more advanced than the western core at various times. So a head start can't be the only answer.
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a school of thought which holds that economics is a subset of psychology. I'd thought that this was reflected in some university departmental organisation, with M.I.T. being the one that came to mind. Despite there being a behavioural economics section there, though, so far as I'm aware Economics remains its own department. Kahneman's training and primary focus were both in psychology, but he was awarded the…
Psychology could legitimately be considered a subset of economics.
If economics is a subset of psychology and psychology is a subset of economics, then economics equals psychology.
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#139Feel like I'm the only one who couldn't get through Thinking, Fast and Slow. Felt like a rambling slog, with most of the interesting bits being something that was very common sense to me.
When did you read the book? It seems to me that the ideas within the book now pervade culture in ways that it didn't when it first came out. If you read it recently it could contribute to your feeling of this being common sense. Also because this idea feels like common sense doesn't mean that it was. Evolution is common sense now but it was a revolutionary way to think of species when On The Origin Of Species came ou…
Yup, exactly this
Re: Daniel Kahneman has died
#140May he rest in peace